


Touch

by evil bunny wolf (evil_bunny_king)



Series: you make me feel so criminal [4]
Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: F/M, frank doesn't quite know how to process this information, halloween outfits, karen's in hot pants, kastle halloween
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-08
Updated: 2016-12-20
Packaged: 2018-08-29 22:58:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8508823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evil_bunny_king/pseuds/evil%20bunny%20wolf
Summary: “Why are you here?” he settles on, instead.Her hand moves to the marks on his neck, thumb grazing his adam’s apple.“Because I made a choice. And now I'm making another.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gift for the wonderful Agents-Galore on tumblr! Kastlehalloween, 2016. It also fits into my Author's verse as a potential follow-up, so I'm officially integrating these. For now. :')

Karen calls him a week before Halloween.

“Hey, can you come over?” Karen’s words are rushed over the phone, interrupted by the click of her heels and the hard edge of her breath - she must be walking home from the office. Frank pins the phone between his shoulder and his ear and finishes snapping back together the colt he’d been cleaning. “I’ve been looking into that problem of yours. I may have a solution.”

“Don’t remember bringing you in on that,” he points out, conversationally. He’s not surprised she knows; she’s a damn hard person to hide things from, and this he wasn’t holding close. He’s not too surprised she called either.

“Didn’t need to,” comes her prompt reply and he slants something like a smile and starts reloading the colt, bullet by bullet. “I can see the cages you’ve been rattling. Theodore’s a hard man to reach, though.”

“No shit. You’ve looked into him before?”

“He’s… a subject of interest, yes.” She’s being evasive. Still looking, then. “ _Which_ is why I really think you should come over.”

She hangs up before he can say anything, the phone beeping in his ear, and he snorts, putting down the gun to slide the phone onto the table.

 _Theodore Andrews_ was a slippery son of a bitch. Frank’d gotten Micro on it, mowed through a few wiseguys trying to find out his schedule, trying to find an opportunity, but all he’d gotten was noise and the idea that Andrews didn’t really trust anybody.

Good decision. Still wouldn’t stop him from eating a bullet, though.

He glances at the time. If he puts the pedal to the floor he can be at her place in thirty minutes.

He puts the colt back in its holster and heads for the car.

 

\--                                                                                 

“I have a way to reach him.”

She cuts to the chase the minute she gets him in the door. He takes that in, taking the few steps to her kitchen table as she marches the couple more to the coffee pot and sets the two mugs of steaming coffee – black, and as bitter as tar – on the table between them before she sits. She’s got this eager, excited fire in her eye as she sits across from him, as she sets her elbows on the table. It’s the look she gets when she’s readying for war.

“Now, it’s not going to be easy. We’ll be able to get into the same building as him, bypass the first line of security, but after that…”

“I’ll take what I can get.” She said we. He’s careful to keep it to _I._

She snorts, obviously catching that.

“Okay,” she says, but he’s not stupid enough to think that it’s over. She lets it go, for now. “You know he owns a series of nightclubs? Well, he’s making an appearance at one of them. The Mayflower, on Halloween. He’s hosting a party.”

“Private event?”

“Exclusive, yes but - not entirely.” She hides a smug smile behind her drink, before wrinkling her nose at the bitterness of it and getting up to grab sweetener. “It’s an anniversary of some sort, apparently. But he’ll definitely be there.”

He watches her go, smoothing his thumb against the side of the mug. “How’d you hear about it?”

She rolls her eyes. “I’ve got a source in the staff. They were notified late, full details reserved for the few, but Frank-” She returns to her seat and dips her head to catch his eye, all eagerness again. “It’s the real deal.”

She stirs the little pill-shaped sweeteners into her drink and he drinks from his own. He’s staked out the Mayflower before, slipped in on a bar night and gotten the lay of the place – it’ll be hard to get in, and harder to get out, but with the bodies on the ground on Halloween of all nights, it should be easier to slip through. It’s a hell of an opportunity.

“You’ve got a plan?” he says, after a moment.

“Yeah.” She takes a sip of ruined coffee and then sets it aside, splaying her hands as she speaks. “Theodore has a… routine, on club nights. After eleven he heads upstairs to one of the private rooms to conduct business, hold meetings, arrange trade deals. He’s still well-guarded but it’s a time and place that we can actually _reach him_ , and if we cause enough of a distraction…” Her hands regroup over her mug. “It’s possible we could get in, and get some time with him – enough for what we want to do.”

She’s saying _we_ again. It’s starting to scratch at him. “And I’m there for what,” he says, a little flatly. “Muscle?”

Her gaze flicks quickly to his biceps, bunched from where he has his elbows on the table, and he’s not sure whether he should feel flattered or self-conscious. Her savage smile returns.

“In a sense. I’m sure you can be so much more than just a pretty face, though.”

He refuses to laugh at that. He does smile though. “Cute,” he informs her. “But beside the point.”

He takes a swig of the coffee, scrunching his nose at the taste and then setting it down definitively in front of him - and he can feel her eyes on him, as if she’s guessed what’s coming. She probably has. Her gaze is sharp, blue, and that little bit too bright.

“This is dangerous, Karen. This guy, shit. He's the real deal.”

She doesn’t look away, doesn’t waver, and when she speaks her words are firm. “Yeah, I know that. But I need to be there."

“Yeah?” He cocks a brow. “What’s to stop me from taking this information and heading in anyway?”

“I-” She catches herself, taking a breath and then she laughs. He feels her bravado slipping away – and that’s what it was, behind her words, he can see that now. “Nothing, Frank.” She flattens her hands around her mug. “Nothing." She takes half a breath, and starts again. "And that’s why I offered it up front. I do have a way in, though. And I’ll be there regardless. All I want is – the chance to ask him a question or two, on my own terms.”

There’s an edge to her voice, between a laugh and something else. It becomes more evident, raw, as she continues.

“This is about more than just – the crap he’s involved with, Frank. It’s the real lives he’s ruined, the families he’s torn apart." Her gaze is beseeching. "They deserve _answers_.”

 _Answers._  He considers that.

There’s only one way this will end now that he’s involved. _Andrews_ has a list of sins that sets his trigger finger twitching – and she knows that, she knew that when she called him. She knows what this means.

He sees that thin line again, the one she was trying so hard to drag him back over. She’s not trying, this time.

“You sure about this?” he begins, tilting his head, feeling the words rasp in his throat. “Because this, it sounds a hell of a lot like-”

“Yes,” she says, cutting him off. She holds his gaze, and he sees that fire of hers, eager and bright and _angry_. “Yes, I’m sure.”

They look at each other another moment. And then she sighs.

“Besides,” she says on a laugh. It’s forced, though, and she looks away, her hair escaping from behind her ear and cascading across her cheek. There’s tension in the line of her shoulders, in her tight grip on the mug. He wonders how he hadn’t noticed it before. “I need back up. I’m pretty sure you owe me at least one favour.”

He considers her, finger ticking.

“How much information do you have on this guy?”

“Too much, and not enough. Not enough to make anything _stick_.”

He nods, slowly, and she waits, reaching up to slide her hair back behind her ear so she can see him properly again. So she can look at him, directly.

“If we do this,” he says, and she flicks her gaze up to meet his again, too-bright but still so steady. “We do it my way. Okay? You follow my instructions. Get out when I tell you.”

She composes her mouth into a smile.

“Okay.”

He goes for his mug. “Tell me the plan.”

 

\--

 

Three days later and she meets him outside a closed barbershop two blocks away from the club, wearing a pair of boots so tall they could graze her knees. She's sees him judging them as he finally picks her out of the crowd of costumes, catching her attention with a nod. It’s what adds the swing to her step as she sashays over, greeting him with a wide smile that reveals a pair of ridiculous vampire fangs.

“Frank.” She’s washed out by the streetlights, skin too pale against the red wig she’s commandeered for the occasion. She’s in hotpants and a leather jacket that it’s miracle she hasn’t frozen to death in yet. She’s a little taller than him, too. “You’ve bought a razor. It suits you.”

She raises a hand almost as if to trace his now-smooth jaw and he jolts, a knee-jerk reaction that he barely registers before her hands are back at her sides.

“Your outfit could use some work, though,” she concludes, taking a step back as if to eye him up better. “Jeans, Frank? Really?”

He shrugs the comment off, not looking at her, although he feels the corners of his mouth twitch traitorously. “I’m sure I’ll fit in,” he deadpans. His outfit’s fine. He schools his expression and squints up the street. “All the prep’s in place. Ready to go?”

She nods and her smile turns sharper, less amicable, teeth pressing against her lower lip. She’s folded her arms across her chest. He can see her grip tighten around her elbows. “Yeah, I am.”

She looks at him as if she’s daring him to disagree. And yeah, he’s been in the area for the last couple of hours, splicing Micro into the club’s CCTV and training a rifle’s scope on the entrances on a half-hope that Andrews would be stupid enough to walk under it. They’ve been over the plan countless times, walked through how it’s going to go, but still, he’s got this itch settling along the back of his neck.

He rolls it out with his shoulders.

“Alright then.”

She falls into step beside him with swaying hips and that energy in her eyes again, her hands curled into tight, sharp fists.

 

\--

 

They get in.

They make their way to Andrews’ meeting room up a back stair, Micro’s voice a crackle in his ear, their eye in the sky, and as Frank chokes out the last of the security Karen steps over the legs of the other and into the room, her gun trained on Andrews.

The corridor lies between them. As she sidesteps closer to the door, hooking her heel around the edge, he realises what she’s going to do.

“My questions, Frank,” she reminds him before he can say anything. He can hardly hear her over the throb of the music a floor below - it hums in his chest, pulsing like a too-fast heartbeat.

She closes the door.

He tries to stagger up and after her and gets a fist in the gut for it.

It’s a long stretch of minutes as he tussles on the floor like that, fist for fist, gun kicked just out of reach. Finally he manages to work a hand into the man’s hair and he uses that to slam his head into the wall, once, again, and then again, until the grip around his neck loosens and the bodyguard drops like a stone, sagging into the plush carpet.

He hauls himself back to his feet, breathing raggedly, and heads for the door. It opens before he reaches it, though, and there’s Karen standing in the doorway, gun still trained inside the room.

There’s a deepening redness across her cheek and specks of blood around her neck.

“He’s all yours,” she says, not looking at him, and then she lets out a breath, hissing it out slowly. She puts the gun away into her purse, and then tries to slip past him, but he catches her arm, a hand raising to trace the edge of the rising bruise. He can see movement in the room beyond - Andrews is on the floor, moaning, and slowly working himself to his feet – but Frank can’t look away. He can’t make himself stop looking.

 _That was not the plan,_ he intends to say. “Did he _hurt you_ ,” comes out instead, and he can’t quite recognise his voice, registering it more through the rumble in his throat.

She jerks her head up and her arm away.

“Yes,” she says, bluntly. “And then I broke his nose for it.”

She shifts her purse higher up her shoulder. Her knuckles are just as red as her cheek where they grip the purse strap, he notices, and they’ll have bruises if she’s lucky; be broken if she’s not. He reaches for them too, moving automatically, and this time, she lets him. His fingers trace the damage lightly, gently.

He pulls away. His pulse is heavy in his throat.

“Did you get what you need,” he hears himself say, low and grinding and unfamiliar.

She’s walking away from him, her jaw set, and he’d almost not notice how her hands were shaking as she stations herself in front of the nearest fire alarm, preparing to pull it.

“Yeah. Yeah, I did.”

He nods, once. And then she pulls the alarm and he steps into the room, closing the door behind him.

 

\--

 

When he makes it back to base (a box-room apartment with holes in the walls) Karen is waiting for him, all the rage - the slow, thick pulse of it - leaching out of her.

She’s slumped down on the cot in the corner, staring through the floor, and she barely looks up when he enters. She sits there, and she runs her hands through her hair, pulling it out of its tight bun when she reaches the knot. Her hair cascades back over her shoulders, dipping past her ears to hide her eyes.

He doesn’t say anything. He goes to the sink for a damp towel, and she runs her fingers through her hair again, knotting them in there as if she wants to tear it out.

He walks back over to her, taking the cheap, fold-up chair with him as he gives her the towel.

"That shit you pulled today," he offers, breaking the silence. She wipes the towel down her cheek, wincing when she hits the bruise. Her makeup comes off in streaks of white and red. "That was pretty damn stupid."

She reaches up as if to wipe her cheek again, her mouth a firm line, but then it wavers and her hands sink to her lap.

"Yeah, Frank. I know."

He looks at her, hard. And he's angry, yes, but he recognises grief when he sees it.

He clears his throat, ignoring the bruises, and tilts his head to look at her. “You want to tell me what that was about?”

She twists the towel between her hands, frowning down at it.

“I,” she starts, and then she stops. She shrugs, a little helplessly, looking at him from behind her hair. “I don’t feel... better. And I knew I wouldn’t, abstractly, I know that’s not how this works and I’ve - lived that before - but somehow I was still-”

She takes a breath and pushes her hair behind her ears, trying to piece herself back together.

“I’m sorry, Frank. It was reckless. And against our agreement.”

He shifts in his seat, looking down at his hands - he swallows, and his throat hurts. “Yeah. Yeah it was.”

 _I’ve lived that before_ \- he’s gotten hints of that, read it in the way she holds her gun but he doesn’t know _why;_  why this all mattered to her the way it did.

She doesn't offer anything more. He swallows the questions thick in his throat and gives her that privacy.

“Are you okay?” he asks, in lieu of anything else. It’s a stupid question.

She brushes her hair behind her ears again, needlessly, and answers him honestly:

“No. No, I’m not.”

He lets out a hum of understanding and after a moment gets up and carefully, slowly, he sits down beside her. He doesn’t look at her, not quite, but he holds out his hand.

“Okay.”

She lets out a sound - something muffled, between a laugh and a sob, and sags against his side, her fingers fitting between his own.

 

\--

 

She’s gone before the morning. He wakes alone in his ratty cot and stares at the ceiling, a hand trailing across his sheets and thinking, still thinking.

After a while he drags himself up and into the kitchen. Cracks eggs into a skillet.

He keeps the radio on the long enough to hear the latest about _the Punisher claims another victim_ before he turns that shit off.


	2. hunt me down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gift for the amazing Artemisgarden on tumblr :D

Karen knocks on his warehouse door three days after Halloween.

The security system picks her up before she crosses the property line. He has a good minute or so, watching her through the grainy phone feed of the CCTV, to think this through, to weigh his options before she reaches the stoop. Unlikely it’s a setup, she's too direct for that, but then she’s too calm for this to be an emergency, either, too controlled.

He considers that, as she stops before the door. As she waits there, and after a moment cranes her neck back, looking for the camera she knows he must have and shading her eyes against the security lamp. Her features smudge black and grey across his screen.

She goes to knock again and he sucks his teeth before rocking himself away from the work bench he was leaning on and sliding open the door.

Three days ago she’d helped him kill a man.

Why are you back, he wants to ask. Why are you _still here?_

“Thought the deal with getting this address,” he says instead, crooking his arm across the entrance. “Was that it was for emergencies, only.”

“Frank,” she says, and it's not a request.

She's in her heels. It gives her an inch or so on him, an edge as she takes a step closer, as if regardless of whether he moves or not she’d make her way through, and as tempted as he is to test that, he turns aside. She slips through the cracked door and slides it shut behind her. Her hair spills out of her coat and across her shoulders like spun glass.

It's only a few more steps to what passes as his kitchen, or the sofa in the corner, but this time she stops where she stands.

“We need to talk,” she says.

There is something in the way she’s looking at him. The way she tugs at her scarf and then her coat, folding them in her arms, and he casts an eye back over the perimeter screens, doubting his earlier assessment.

“No, Frank-” She starts before he can say anything and she breaks off and laughs, arms tightening around the bundle of her outerwear. “I mean, just talk.”

He takes this in, and nods, just the once.

“Okay.”

She takes a breath as if to speak- and then she takes a couple steps farther in, placing her things definitively on the table.

“I don't regret it,” she says finally, with her back to him.

He doesn't have to ask what she means. He smooths a hand over his jaw, and something like laughter, inappropriate, edged, bubbles in his chest. They are surrounded by the artillery lined walls and the sparse necessities his war demands. Her heels had clicked when she walked across the functional tile.

“Do you think you should?”

She braces herself against the table a moment.

“Yes. No.”

She turns back towards him, two spots of heat high on her cheeks, burned in by the cold. “He hurt a lot of people. Now he can't.”

 _What are you looking for_? He wants to ask. _What_   _do you think you'll find here?_

“Why’d you call me that night?” he says instead.

“Because-” She breaks off and her head tips forward, her hair cascading from shoulders. She looks away, gaze passing over the warehouse-turned-arsenal, unseeingly. “It was the only way I could get answers.” A pause. And then the truth: “and I wanted to hurt him.”

He sees her consider that, what she’s just admitted. It's something she's never said out loud before, shared, and there’s a warning sounding in his head somewhere as she tangles a hand in her hair, that familiar motion.

“I just feel like-” She cuts herself off to laugh, as if she knows how ridiculous she's about to sound. “Like I'm holding onto Matt’s guilt and Foggy’s guilt, more than my own. That mine’s just, a small flicker of a thing but I can't seem to get it right, my fingers hitting the wrong keys. And I'm not sure what that makes me. You know? Not sure whether I'm...”

He moves forward at the pain in her voice, hands twitching in an aborted movement to reach for her. She watches his approach, but there’s a flicker of something across her features - the widening of her eyes, her tightening grip on the table edge - that-

He's hit with realisation like a hammer blow and forces his hands back to his sides, open and loose, non-threatening, and feels -  _angry._

“Do you think you deserve to be _punished_?” His voice comes out tight and wrong, rougher than he’d intended. “That why you’re here?”

He sees her flush with something akin to awareness, shame, before she shakes her head firmly.

“No.” But then, in that same, small voice: “Maybe I’d deserve that.”

He makes a noise in his throat, harsh and disbelieving and that little bit pained. “You believe that?”

She doesn’t meet his gaze. She tips her head back to look through the ceiling and thinks it through, and the room is silent save for the whir of his computer fan, the drip of the tap in the corner.

“No,” she says, after a long moment. As if she’s fit the pieces together, and the picture’s different than the one she’d expected. “No, I don’t.”

He waits a beat, counting his breaths, in, out, her eyes on him again, that little bit too sharp and bright.

And the thing is, he recognises that. The false step where guilt should be - and the itch along the back of his neck becomes a full shiver, spider-stepping down his spine.

He flexes his hands at his sides, looking away. Re-establishing distance. They’ve been here before.

“Why are you here?" he asks.

“Because,” she begins, and then she takes a decisive step towards him.

She takes another, and then a few more, until she’s standing before him again and raising a hand to trace a scar across his cheek – but when he starts she doesn’t back off, this time, and when he reaches for her his fingers loop around her wrist, firm enough to warn, but not to pull away.

Her hand moves to the marks on his neck, fingertips just grazing the skin, and she looks at him. Her eyes are washed silver by the fluorescent light, the kind of crystalline brightness that edges into blue.

“Because I made a choice,” she says. “And now I'm making another.”

Her hands slide to his jaw, gently, telegraphing her movements, giving him time to pull away, but he doesn't.

And then she kisses him.

Her lips are soft. Warm. It’s familiar and unfamiliar, and her fingertips against his cheek, drawing back to settle, lightly, at the back of his neck. It’s _good_ and he feels himself shiver, his fingers around her wrist twitching before she pulls away. This time, his ghosts are quieter.

Karen’s eyes are closed. She blinks them back open, their flutter the only thing that reveals her nerves, and then she takes a breath, to ask some shit like how he's feeling, if he's _sure._

He pulls her closer.

Hands on her waist. Her arms around his neck, tipping him up, her heels clicking as she stumbles a step back, and then the warm weight of her presses against his chest, pushing back.

“Is this what you want?” she whispers between them, at some point, perhaps in a pause for breath. Her hands are in the scruff of his hair at the back of his head, tugging, holding, and it takes a second for him to pull his thoughts together. But he knows what she's asking, and it's what he’d be wondering too. And he knows his answer – the simple fact of it.

“Yeah. Yeah it is.” He thumbs her cheek; touches the edge of her mouth. Her lips part against it and he takes a breath and doesn’t look away. “Is it what you want?”

_You shouldn't, you shouldn't you shouldn't-_

She lets out something like a laugh, something sad, and then she kisses him again and the muscle of his heart feels like it’s forcing itself through his ribs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stay tuned for the smutty conclusion ;D (if I can stop blushing...)


End file.
